


Marks

by Pom_Rania



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Gen, Post-Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 11:22:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11873310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pom_Rania/pseuds/Pom_Rania
Summary: From a swrrequests prompt: soulmate AU where you share your soulmate's scars, and how that plays out with Hera and Kanan after Malachor.





	Marks

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote down my thoughts about how this type of soulmate AU would work, [here](http://pomrania.tumblr.com/post/164458795559/scarmates-a-particular-soulmates-au). That's my tumblr, where pretty much everything I write gets posted before it gets put on here; the relevant tag is "writing".

Nightmares were not uncommon on the Ghost. Everybody had them; even Chopper, inasmuch as a droid could dream. 

  They had a bit of an unspoken system in place. If somebody woke up screaming, you didn’t say anything unless they brought it up first. You went to outside their door, and if they wanted company, they could ask for it. 

  Sabine wasn’t expecting Hera to want company. The captain rarely did when she had a nightmare. Maybe it was different this time because both Kanan and Ezra were away, on something that nobody was sure they would come back from. 

  The door slid open.

  “I was up anyways,” Sabine lied, and politely looked away. It was a fiction, and everybody knew that it was a fiction, but it let them pretend and keep a little bit of dignity. 

  “I couldn’t sleep either,” Hera said. It wasn’t precisely a lie. She wasn’t able to sleep at the moment. 

  Sabine briefly glanced over, automatically, then froze. Something was wrong. 

  “What is it?”

  It was Hera’s face. It was different. Wrong. There was a dark stripe running across it, a sickly dull olive, like a gash. 

  Or a scar. 

  “Sabine?”

  It didn’t exclude her eyes. They were the wrong colour now. Not green, some sort of yellow. 

  “Sabine?”

  This was bad. Very bad. There was no possible way this could be anything other than horrible. 

  “Are you okay? You’re scaring me.”

  Sabine shook herself out of it. Freaking out wouldn’t help anybody. She needed to be calm and in control, for Hera. 

  Oh no, _Hera_. She only seemed slightly worried. _She didn’t know yet_. Which made sense, because she couldn’t see her own face, not without....

  “A mirror,” Sabine managed. “You need to look... I’m sorry.”

  Hera brought a hand up to her face, like she already had some idea of what she might see. If the source of her nightmare and the source of her mark were the same thing, then she probably did. 

  She vanished into her room. There was a strangled cry, then she stumbled back into the hallway. She leaned against the wall for support,  before limply sliding down it. “Kanan,” she breathed.

  Hera had never confirmed that she and Kanan were soulmates. She said that it was a personal matter, and she had that right, but it still seemed obvious. This... this was not how Sabine had wanted it to be confirmed. 

  A thought struck her, and she found herself sitting on the ground as well, before she could fall down. The kind of injury that Hera’s face echoed... it would be blinding. 

  She had to stay calm and in control. Hera shouldn’t have to deal with anything else at the moment, not when the others could take over. 

  “What can I do to help?” she heard herself asking. “Should I inform the medic to be prepared for... that sort of injury?”

  Hera dully nodded. 

  The Phantom arrived the next day. Hera didn’t leave the Ghost until then, literally not showing her face outside. Sabine and Zeb took turns keeping her company, while the other prepared as much as they could. The floors were clear of anything someone could trip on. The medic was expecting an eye injury patient. Sato was informed. There wasn’t much they could do, but they tried. 

  Kanan at least was still alive, Hera would have shown signs if he was dead. But Ezra and Ahsoka didn’t have any known soulmates. There was no telling if they were dead, injured, or unharmed, not until their ship landed. 

  Ezra was the first one out, guiding Kanan. 

  Kanan, with bandaged eyes. 

  Even though Sabine knew it would happen, it still felt like a punch in the gut to actually see it. 

  For her part, Hera almost fell over, but Zeb steadied her. She brushed his arm off, and ran to Kanan. “I’m going to hug you,” she said in a broken voice, “don’t be surprised,” and threw her arms around him. 

  Once Kanan’s face and eyes were as healed as they would ever be, he started wearing a mask to cover the area. Hera had no such option. She could still see – _her_ eyes weren’t scarred over, only discoloured – so she needed to make sure that her vision wasn’t obscured. Goggles were uncomfortable for extended durations, and didn’t conceal it all. The only makeup on base was in human skin tones, nothing even vaguely close to her green. 

  She had kept her and Kanan’s soulmate status private and personal for years. Now she had no choice. There was a recently-blinded man, and a woman with equally-recent and obvious scar-marking on her face, and they were known to be very close with each other. Everybody knew. 

  Before, when Sabine had thought about soulmates echoing each other’s scars, she had imagined it as something intimate. You bore the marks on your chest or arms or back from where your lover almost died but didn’t, and nobody else would know. 

  Even when she was reminded by Ezra that facial scarring existed – he used to joke it was a good thing he hadn’t found a soulmate back then, otherwise they’d be stuck with the same “whiskers” he now had – it still seemed like a minor thing, one that could be easily ignored. 

  It wasn’t always like that. 

  Hera drew stares. She got used to it, apparently. She said that she wasn’t dealing with anything worse than Kanan. She just had the marks, while he’d lost his sight, so really, she had nothing to complain about. Maybe that was what she told herself. 

  Time passed. They healed as much as they could, and learned to function around what would never heal. 

  Months later, Sabine walked in on Hera and Kanan cuddling. They were both fully dressed, but it still felt like she had interrupted something intimate. Kanan’s hands were on Hera’s face, while she guided them to trace the marks on her face.


End file.
